Racism in English Football and the Rooney Rule (Part 1)

I have been working on a post about racism in English football for some time. My initial premise was that the minimal number of minority managers in English League football was prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.  However, the recent announcement by Jose Mourinho that “[t]here is no racism in football” made me reconsider my approach.  Not because there is no racism in football.  That is pure nonsense.  I doubt Jose Mourinho actually believes this. Given his statements on other subjects, he must have seen some sort of advantage to him or Chelsea in staking out this ridiculous position.  I claim no skill in plumbing the depths of Mourinho’s mind, but the advantage might have been as minimal as just avoiding answering a difficult question.

Of course, there is plenty of racism in football—just like there is racism in every other part of life. Giving Mourinho the benefit of the doubt, he might simply have been claiming that racism is not a factor in the hiring of players, managers, and coaches in English football.  That claim would also be false, but it is a little closer to reality. Or maybe he deliberately made a ridiculous statement to force more discussion or action on the issue.

In any case, any contention that there is no racism in football is nonsensical when you consider the wide range of ways racism can manifest.  At the very least, there is racism on the part of some fans since incidents of racist abuse of players by fans abound.  No doubt the problem is worse in a number of other countries than it is in England.  For example, Hulk, reported being racially abused in Russia just last month.  It was the second major racism incident in the Russian Premier league in the same week. 

Setting aside racist behavior by fans, there is a wide range of other racist behavior that can and probably does occur.  Detecting racism is not always easy because not all acts of bigotry are deliberate, overt, or even clear cut.  Usually, when people act for racist reasons, they do not announce their true motives.  Other times people act for racist motives, but do not even realize that they are doing so.  Finally, sometimes the racism is institutionalized into an organization’s structure so that no current member has to actively work to keep the racism going.

These kinds of racism can affect hiring decisions, transfer decisions, playing decisions, and pay rates.  If a referee happens to be racist, either consciously or subconsciously, his bias can, obviously, affect virtually any call he makes.  For that matter racism could play a part in which players get work permits.  Given the vast number of decisions that are made every day in football—most of them without public scrutiny—no one can reasonably argue that racism never plays a part in English football.

Certainly, racism has been a significant problem in the recent past.  This summer Jason Roberts (Wikepedia biography here ) talked about his encounters with racism while playing English football.  The interview can be found here.  A few points are worth noting.

He said that racism was not much of an issue for him until he started playing football. At age 9 (1987 or so) he was in a locker room with his uncle when someone made a racist remark.  When he was 13 or 14, in 1991 or 1992, a teammate’s father used a racial insult on him.  He, apparently, continued to suffer racial abuse of varying types and degrees throughout his career.  Since he only retired this year, I do not think this can all be put in the distant past category.

There is an organization devoted to fighting discrimination in football, Kick it Out, which many of us know through its connection with Football Manager.  They have created Equity Standards for clubs to implement to fight discrimination of all kinds, not just racism.  The standards can be found here.  The Preliminary Level is not particularly difficult to accomplish.  Effectively, it requires nothing more than a devotion to fighting discrimination and relatively modest steps to demonstrate and implement that devotion.  Yet, according to their web site  only eleven English teams have taken these relatively minimal steps and only six teams have made the somewhat greater effort to achieve the Intermediate and Advanced Levels.  Unfortunately, Southampton FC is not one of those 17 teams, which, quite frankly, is embarrassing.  Our club should move forward on this immediately.

Of course, all the news about racism in English football is not bad.  Four and a half years ago a study appeared to show that racism was not a factor in the decisions by referees to hand out yellow cards.  That does not prove that there is no racial bias in refereeing, but it is something.

Given the high profile, cosmopolitan nature of the BPL and the money at stake, it is very likely that racism is not a major factor in the decision of what players to sign and, probably, what players to play.  Possibly it might be a factor in how much a player is paid—although my research has not located a study of that issue.  Certainly, minorities (or more accurately, blacks, but not Asians) are more common as players in the BPL than they are as residents of England.  According to Wikipedia’s summary of the 2011 Census,  whites are 85.4% of the population, Blacks are 3.5%, and Asians are 7.8%. According to the BBC, 25% of the professional footballers in England are non-white.  Presumably, non-white players are more common in the BPL than in lower divisions—if only because foreign players are more common in the BPL than in lower divisions.

Very likely, the lower profile and lower stakes of the lower leagues leave more opportunity for racism to come into play.  Certainly, it is unlikely that racism plays absolutely no part in personnel decisions on the part of anyone in English football—especially given how prevalent racism was in the recent past.  Remember that it was less than six and a half years ago that Paul Ince became the first black man hired as a BPL manager. 

The primary recent focus has been on the lack of black managers in English league football—right now there are just two.  The debate as to what, if anything, should be done about this can be analyzed by considering three questions:  Is there actually a problem?  If so, should the authorities try to fix the problem?  And, if so, is the “Rooney Rule” the right way to go about fixing the problem?

I am not going to devote much more effort to answering the first question.  I think that the brief survey of racism I have already provided should be enough to answer that question.  Anyone who thinks there is no problem is either being willfully blind or is okay with discrimination against minorities. Also, I just discovered Clarke Carlisle’s 2012 56 minute long documentary , “Is Football Racist?” which I am going to watch.  It is available on youtube here.  If he answers his own question with a “no” I will reconsider my analysis in my next post.

If not, my next post on this subject will consider the other two questions which will inevitably start with a discussion of the “Rooney Rule.”  However, I want to leave you with a thought experiment.  Consider Wayne Rooney.  (No connection to the "Rooney Rule.")  He makes £300,000 a week and is the captain of the English national team.  Given his skill level and history of misconduct, would either of those facts be true if he were a black Englishman?

Possible Reasons for not Signing Jack Cork Right Now

Let me begin by making it clear that I think we should sign Jack Cork to a new contract right now.  He is a valuable player for the team and could start for at least half of the other Premier League clubs.  That being said, the club’s failure to sign him or explain why they are not signing him is probably not irrational.  I can think of a number of possible explanations.  Moreover, none of these possible reasons are ones that the club would publically disclose. (Please note that I have no inside information.  This article is pure speculation.)

Possible Explanation:  Now is not the right time to sign him.

In a perfect world, we would want the club to keep Cork, Ward-Prose, Davis, Schneiderlin, and Wanyama.  Davis just signed a new contract.  Ward-Prose signed a long term contract last year, but we have seen how ineffective such contracts are at retaining young players against their will.  The club might be planning to sign all of the midfielders to new contracts.  If so, they will want to sign them in the right order.  If they were to sign Cork, his new salary would act as a floor for the salaries that would be expected by Wanyama, Schneiderlin, and possibly Ward-Prose.  If so, it would make sense to put off signing Cork until one of the others was signed—after all the Wanyama and Schneiderlin salaries would act as a ceiling on what Cork could expect.

Possible Explanation:  Financial Fair Play (FFP) Issues

The club might want to make sure signing Cork fits within its FFP limitations before resigning him.

At this point the club cannot rule out qualifying for Europe for the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 seasons. As a precaution, the club will want to avoid any FFP issues.  The club lost £11.942 million in 2011-2012 and £6.551 million in 2012-2013.  The figures for 2013-2014 are not in yet, but very likely the club made another loss.  Given the high level of transfer spending last year, let’s just pretend the club lost £20 million.  That would make the three year loses over £38 million.  At today’s conversion rates, that is over 48 million Euros.  The allowable loss for that three year period is only 45 million Euros.  Some expenses—particularly, the costs of the academy—do not count so we are well under the limit unless my guess as to the amount of the loss is wrong.  If we actually lost £40 million last year there is a real problem, so the club would want to show progress to UEFA by being able to say, in good faith, that there would be a profit in 2014-2015. Moreover, any loss over 5 million Euros must be funded by Owner contributions.  Liebherr did put in nearly £38 million in fiscal 2012-2013 so we are probably good on that.  This probably means we should be ok if we qualify for Europe for this season.

However, the FFP limit for 2016-2017 qualification is only a loss of 30 million Euros for the three season beginning with 2012-2013.  Given my earlier guess, we are at losses of 26 million Euros before 2014-2015 is considered.  Right now, we have a transfer profit large enough to make EUFA FFP completely irrelevant.  However, that could change if the club needs or wants to make significant January signings or if several players are signed to new, more lucrative contracts.  The club may have to hold off on signing Cork until it has a clear idea where it stands with respect to FFP issues.  Possibly, if enough other players are signed to new contracts, we cannot afford Cork.

Possible Explanation:  Salary Cap Issues

I have already discussed the salary cap at great length on multiple occasions, so I will not repeat that discussion here.  I currently do not believe that Southampton faces significant salary cap issues but I could be wrong.  If so, they would want to put off increasing Cork’s salary as long as possible.

Even if there are no current salary cap issues, the club might want to save its salary cap maneuvering room for other players.  Clyne will be expensive to re-sign.  The club might be considering exercising its options on Bertrand or Alderweireld in January.  Certainly, Alderweireld would get a pay raise if that happens.  New contracts for Clyne, Schneiderlin, Rodriguez, and Alderweireld could eat up millions of pounds of salary cap space.  The club might not want to commit to Cork until it knows whether it needs the cap space for other players.

Possible Explanation:  Cash Flow

We all assume the club has plenty of money right now, but it might not.  What if we sold Luke Shaw for £6 million a year for five years, but bought Shane Long for £12 in cash?  What if the deal for Lallana involved saving a little money in the long run by giving Bournemouth its money up front?  These are just examples, of course, not facts I am asserting are true.  However, we do know that there were substantial fees due this year from past transfers and Staplewood cost a lot of money.  A cash flow problem is not at all unlikely.  If Cork were signed to a new contract, any signing bonus, agent fees, and increased salary would have to be paid in cash.  Possibly the board does not want to commit to this expense earlier than it has to.  Maybe it is waiting for the arrival of the next payment of Shaw money from Manchester United.

Possible Explanation:  He is not a good enough player.

Both of our last two managers have clearly not seen him as first choice.  Pochettino preferred  Schneiderlin, Davis, Wanyama, and possibly, Ward-Prose.  Koeman prefers Schneiderlin, Davis, Ward-Prose, and possible Wanyama.

Cork seems to play well when he gets into the game and is getting a run of starts now, but I would never put my judgment of his skills up against that of the club’s manager.   If Cork were to leave, we would need a squad player to act as cover in the central midfield.  Whomever we got to replace him would probably be more expensive or not as good or both so I still think it would make sense to sign him, but possibly the club has already identified a good, but cheaper, transfer target to replace him.

As I hope I made clear, I do not have any actual information about any of this, but I hope I have also made clear that there can be perfectly good reasons why the club is not immediately signing Jack Cork to a new contract.

I comment on Les Reed’s 38 minute long speech at the 2014 Global Sportstec Innovation Conference.

Although the speech has a great deal of significant information, it was presented at a Sportstec conference and, in some ways, is a commercial for Sportstec’s Sportcode software.  Here is a link to a video describing that product.  I am in no position to judge the quality of the product, but I can see how it would be useful to Southampton FC.  A lot of other teams use Sportstec products.  Manchester City has posted a video about their use of Sportscode here.  A list of Sportstec’s customers can be found here.    All BPL teams are listed as using Sportscode, except Stoke and Aston Villa.

I found it interesting that Southampton provides everyone with an iPad.  From Reed’s discussion of the number of personnel, it sounds like that is over 400 iPads.  Expensive.  But it could be worse.  What if they all needed two iPads like I do?

Reed explained a few things about which I had been curious.  Under current Rules, Southampton, as a team with a Category A academy, can buy, fairly cheaply, a young player from anywhere in England—so long as the player wishes to move to Southampton.  I have wondered why Southampton has not taken advantage of its reputation—both as a quality place to learn football and as a club that gives playing opportunities to young players—to buy more young players away from other teams.  Apparently, the club wants to focus on the south of England and scoop up all the best young players there rather than buy from other teams—although we did buy 15 year old Neal Osborn from Torquay United over the summer,  but Torquay is certainly within the Southampton region as defined by Reed.  Given Reed’s emphasis on there being a “pathway”, one would presume that means that the club believes that, down the road, there will be an opening for the 15-year-old goalkeeper in the first team—if he develops as hoped.  Of course, that is probably true for everyone at the academy.

Reed’s critique of the top down approach adopted by Chelsea and Manchester United is interesting.  Southampton believes that the manager must fit the Southampton system because the system will not change to fit the manager.  Thus, there are a whole lot of managers who will never be hired by Southampton, including, for example, Tony Pullis and Sam Allardyce.  It probably means that few world class managers would be suitable for Southampton—Pep Guardiola maybe, but not Jose Mourinho.  Most importantly, it means that when Ronald Koeman leaves we do not have to worry about everything suddenly changing.  The club will hire a manager that intends to play the same basic way so the players who are already here will still fit right in.  There will be no need to sell unsuitable players at a loss so that the new manager can overpay for his type of player.

This information is both relevant and significant to the evaluation I just completed as to whether Southampton can compete with the bigger clubs.  If Southampton will not be wasting money on pointless, but expensive, activities simply because a new manager demands changes, that will save real money.  To the extent the bigger clubs waste money in this way, it somewhat reduces the relative financial deficit Southampton faces in trying to compete with them.

A potential downside to the Southampton philosophy is that the club might be too resistant to change if the Southampton way stops working, but that is a problem for another day since it is working fine now.

One of the threads on Saintsweb (no link, sorry) has had a mini-debate on how much credit the current coaches and staff deserve for the success of our recent academy graduates.  People have pointed out that Luke Shaw, for example, arrived at Southampton in 2003 so current management was not responsible for recruiting him.  In fact, all of our recent youth successes were brought in under an earlier regime. This is inevitable.  No one is going to play regularly in the senior team before age 17 and few will play regularly before age 20.  If the best prospects are brought into the academy at age eight, that means that the current crop of young players must have arrived in 2002 through 2005.  Even if we now have the best spotters of young talent in the world, the first members of the first Liebherr class will not be 18 for five more years.

It does mean that the quality of the young talent being brought in now is unknown, but that will always be true.  Investment in young players will always have a significant element of risk.  Years might go by without a young player being good enough for the senior team.  We just have to hope that the club’s talent judging talents on the senior level are indicative of the club’s skill at the youth level.

Reed said that the academy, coming out of administration, only had six staff members.  The club as a whole only had 14.  It now has 56 full time staff with a number of part timers.  It seems very likely that the training provided by the much larger staff in the past five years must have been significant relative to the training that was being provided as the club was falling apart.  Of course, every Southampton fan should recognize the importance of what the staff did during that time.  Shutting down the academy would have saved money, but things would be a lot worse right now had that happened.

I was not previously aware of “The Coaching Manual.”  I signed up for my free membership.  I am hoping it will give me information that I, as a non-football playing American, never learned as a kid.  We shall see.  The real test will be whether I am sucked into paying the £5/month for premium content.

I have Transcribed Les Reed’s 38 minute long speech at the 2014 Global Sportstec Innovation Conference (Part 2)

Here is part two of the speech:

Talent identification and then excellent coaching coupled together and now we’ve opened our new training facility.  We’ve spent three years building a state of the art facility.  We have changed it from Southampton football training ground to Staplewood Campus because we feel that’s what it is.  It is an environment of elite development—a specialist environment that takes youngsters from 8 years of age on a journey through to premier league football so we almost treat it a bit more like a university than simply a facility.  All the facilities in there have been designed for the purpose of developing and creating this pathway and enabling youngsters to come through that.

We have a big analysis department.  We have an internship program.  So far our interns all end up getting a job somewhere—mostly with us—we don’t like letting them go. They beaver away every day at making sure we are sweating the technology that we’ve got.  So the pitches are excellent. The changing rooms, the hydrotherapy center, the auditoriums, the meeting rooms are fantastic, but it’s about the people that are in them that make the difference.  We make sure we get good people who are specialists who understand the philosophy and develop. We develop our staff in the same way.  We get good at it.  You might have thought our players were attracting quite a bit of attention during this transfer window.  Believe me our staff attracts a lot of attention as well.  We see it as vitally important that we keep our staff and keep them up to date and improve them and improve their knowledge.

What is the vehicle which allows the strategy to be properly implemented? It is essentially that it’s effective, clear, and concise communication.  When I went into the club five years ago, I went in as a consultant.  The club was on its knees.  The academy was broken.  There were about six staff in the academy.  They were doing things from coaching in the evenings to painting the old metal stand that we used to have just to keep the environment going—fantastic people—really, the heart of the club.  The rest of the club was in a terrible state.  The club had just come out of administration and was very understaffed.  The facilities had been run down and the equipment and things had been run down.

We formed what we call a football development and support center which basically describes the people who work in football at the club.  There were about six in the academy— probably 14 people overall involved in football club five years ago in League One with a ten point deduction—so not a great position to be in but a great platform to build on.  There are 56 people now in that football development support center—probably 70 or 80 overall including part time staff and scouts and coaches around the development centers.  There is a bigger price and it’s been a massive investment but the product is there.  You see it at St. Mary’s every Saturday when the team plays because we also have a bottom up policy.

I said at the beginning it’s all about having a philosophy.  It’s about knowing what you can achieve, where you want to go, and how to get there—not a secret, a philosophy.  Then you have to have a strategy in place which delivers that.

One of the big mistakes the clubs make is that they go top down.  I know for a fact that Chelsea each time they have changed their manager they have been walls knocked down, gyms moved, whole changes in philosophy and facilities based on the manager and the senior staff.  Louis van Gaal has just gone into Manchester United and changed a whole range of things in terms of facilities in order to do it his way.  I’m not saying that’s wrong. What I’m saying is that is a top down philosophy.  It is driven from the top and then it trickles down and everybody follows that line.

We deliberately five years ago made a different decision.  This was based on our owner who had taken the club out of administration, Markus Liebherr.  He bought the club because he loved football.  He had an affinity with Southampton through the docks, through his business.  He loved community—big on community.  He loved watching good football.  So the philosophy was based on come redevelop a team that will get into the premier league.  Play in the top of the premier league with 50% of our players developed through our academy.  Can we get a team that can do that and be exciting for the fans so the fans enjoy coming and want to be there every week to see good football?  That was where it started from and then was so what is the strategy to put that together.  It had to be bottom up.  It had to be if that’s what we want to achieve at the end, this is where we have to start building now.  So good techniques, good qualities, the athleticism of the players, everything from 8, 9, 10, and 11 had to drive towards that.

The style of play:  We use through our academy 4-3-3 as a basic structure in terms of the style of play.  Not because 4-3-3 is the winning formula, but because to play 4-3-3 properly you have to develop a whole range of things that you don’t have to develop if you play 4-4-2 where the team is very, very straight and structured and up and down.  4-3-3 requires rotation in midfield.  It requires fullbacks to push on.  It requires center backs to be able to split and have plenty of the ball.

If you want to play entertaining football that people want to watch you keep it on the floor and you play from the back.  So we had to couple all that together with a winning formula where the idea is to do it and do it really well.  Bring in high quality players who have got those techniques.  Develop players who will develop those techniques and do it really well.  Do it better than the others.  Put the whole thing together and do it really well.

What’s the point of developing a player for 8 years in your academy and then a new manager comes in and says we are not doing it that way anymore, we play long ball?  No point.  So our approach has been:  Select a head coach who shares that philosophy.  Select a head coach who will buy into that philosophy, that structure, who will carry on.

Mauricio Pochettino has left us for Spurs.  He carried on on the success that Nigel Adkins had in getting us promoted and developed that style of play which our young players were able to step straight into.  That’s why Chambers, Shaw, Ward-Prowse, Sam Gallagher, players like that who have come through the academy could step into the first team with ease.  They weren’t learning anything new.  They were just taking the next step.

In recruiting Ronald Koeman to replace him, what did we look at?  Feyenoord.  50% of their team in the academy.  50% of the national team in Holland is from Feyenoord’s  academy.  They play good football.  They keep it on the floor. They play at the back. They have a successful coach who’s taking a step further in terms of his own reputation, in terms of trophies and winning things with a fantastic reputation as a player who buys into exactly the same philosophy.  So a smooth transition—not coming in banging walls about, changing things because I am the manager and I want that pitch turned down that way and so on.  Come in saying this is fantastic.  What a great place to work.  The players coming through are doing it exactly the way I would like them to it.

So you chose a manager who doesn’t believe in that, you are putting all that you have done over the last five years in jeopardy.  So we would have preferred not to have to appoint a new manager, but we did so we went through that process.

What’s this got to do with what we’re talking about now.  When we appointed Pochettino, he was a relatively unknown manager, but we wanted this manager who has got to be able to develop the style and continue what we were doing in the academy.  So we looked at a long list of coaches whose reputations were that they worked well with young players, they developed young players, and they are not frightened to put young players in the first team.  That’s where the scouting recruitment analysis department comes in again.  It’s not just players.  So let’s look at their teams.  Let’s analyze their teams.  Let’s see if it mirrors what we think.  Let’s look at their style, their philosophy and see which of these managers on our long list get on our short list based on what they’ve done.  Let’s look at how many players they’ve brought through from the academies at their clubs into the first team.  Are they brave enough to do it?  What’s the average age of their teams?  Do they like working with young dynamic teams or do they prefer experienced players who maybe on the way towards the end of their careers?  That’s all done by that department.  Clips and everything put together, set down, and then when I get to a point where I feel we have the right one, we visually show it to the board.  This is the style of this guy.  This is what he does.  Visually looking at it through the technology that we’ve got.  Then we repeat the same process when Pochettino leaves and Koeman comes in. So do your work.

Fans get frustrated and want to know why you haven’t appointed a manager yet.  We haven’t appointed a manager because we want to get the right one and we are going to take our time and do it properly and that’s the same with player recruitment.  So in that department we have three sections.  We have the junior academy section youth recruitment.  We have youth recruitment to the academy and we have senior recruitment.  All work into the same structures, same philosophies and we go through this whole process.  Natasha is a performance analyst.  So she delivers all the stuff from training and match performance with the coaches—does a great job.  Her colleagues, we have two colleagues who are recruitment analysts.  They spend all their day downloading film from all the leagues around Europe, getting video in from all the different leagues, categorizing it, photo basing it so when we actually scout and our scouts say there’s a player at Schalke that plays number 4—ba ba boom—we’ve got it already.  And if we haven’t got it, we know where to get it and we get it quickly.  We go through that process of analyzing or being able to analyze our target players and do the right due diligence on them to bring them in.

So you can’t do that unless everybody’s singing from the same hymn sheet, all on the same page, know their roles.  So we don’t have those incessant  arguments with coaches and scouts saying I brought in a good player but the coaching was crap or I’m a great coach, but you’re bringing in crap talent.  We don’t have that.  It’s a team they all work together on those decisions.  They can work together because we have got the right tools to facilitate it.

We’ve created an environment where the technical ability of the players is matched with the technical ability of the coaching and development staff and we base a lot of our work on visual learning.  We need the right tools to facilitate that.  Hence, the resources we’ve put into the scouting, recruitment, and analysis department.  We have a room in there called the black box which is sealed off.  It has got the biggest TV screen I’ve ever seen.  It’s the place where the coaches, the manager, the heads of recruitment go in.  All touch screen technology.  We bring up a list of players.  We talk about them.  We show their profiles, their backgrounds, and then, at the touch of a finger, you can go straight into whatever you clips you want on them.  That speeds up the process. It’s a useful technology to put in what is complex program of work, but make it easy to manipulate.  So we have invested in technology.  We use a lot of different technology.  All of our training pitches have remote control cameras behind the goals and on the half way line.  So Natasha can do her work from her desk without going out there in the rain with the camera on her shoulder unless she still likes doing that.  But it means every training session—whether it’s the under 8s, whether it’s the under 12s, the 16s, the 18s, either playing or training—it can be recorded through remote control.  And we do and that’s how we get all the clips and the content for their iPads and so on and so forth.

Interestingly, enough, this conference has been put on by Sportstec.  We have a  long relationship with Sportscode and we worked a lot with Christian, Terry, and Jinx [?] over the years developing it.  It underpins all those things.  We deliver all those things.  How do we capture the content?  We have found the best technology to use is Sportscode because it is very, very adaptable.  So everything in the black box has gone through the Sportscode system.  Yeh, we have editing and Final Cut software that runs alongside it, but the actual work is done by the utilization of Sportscode because it is so adaptable. 

I have Transcribed Les Reed’s 38 minute long speech at the 2014 Global Sportstec Innovation Conference (Part 1)

I decided I wanted a written transcript of this speech to help with various blog related projects.  As usual when I transcribe things, I have eliminated the verbal ticks, false starts, and obviously unnecessary words.  Reed uses “and” and “but” a lot to speak in run on sentences.  I have tried to fix some of that.  Like everyone else, he sometimes does not speak in complete sentences. I have not altered that much because it might change his meaning.  He often unnecessarily uses some form of “I think.”  When it appears to be just a verbal tick, I have edited it out.  Generally, the points he makes are clear enough.

Due to the length of the speech, at least in blog terms, I have broken it into two parts. I have some comments about the speech but I will put them in a third post because the other two are long enough already.  The speech begins:

30 years since stopping play.  I’ve probably done every job there exists in professional football and probably in grassroots football as well.  It’s amazing that I learn new things every day.  There are new experiences.   The game changes so rapidly that you never know it all.   You’ve never seen it, done it.   There is always something that is going to surprise you around the corner and I’ve had a few of those in the last couple weeks.

The important thing for me is having done a number of different roles in professional football clubs, also with the national federation, and also overseas national federations.  There can’t be many countries I haven’t worked in at some point either coaching or advising or consulting.  All of that matrix of people who work in the game, the different roles in the game, it all comes down to communication at the end.  Good communication means all those parts of the whole work well together. You will have a good organization and you’ll achieve success.  But without good communication then you always going to have difficulties and things will be slow.  I am going to talk through how that relates to how we organize the club and how we operate the club and how it links into the theme of this conference.

We have a fantastic reputation for our youth policy, our academy, and our ability to develop players.  The interesting thing about that is it’s a legacy.  It’s something that everybody who works at Southampton now has inherited from Southampton history.  People always talk about Garreth Bale and forget Matt Le Tissier, but it goes back to that time when Southampton were developing stars from a long time ago.  The recent history has multiplied the number of players that come through the system and also go right through to the top level.  Obviously, the biggest exemplar of that at the moment would be Luke Shaw moving to Manchester United.    A boy who made his debut at 16, who many people thought would be a future star, but nobody really thought that having got in the first team, he would stay there, see off two other senior left backs on that journey and become the number one premiere league left back at 17 years of age and get a massive number of appearances and perform against big, big clubs.

But Luke is only the latest one off the conveyer belt to move on.  There are bigger numbers now in the academy—a lot of players coming through.  I always used to say way back in the day that there used to be kind of a number and rule that an academy was successful if it brought one player through to the first team.  The academy managers or centers of excellence directors at the time used to hang their hat on that.  I always used to say that’s a waste of money.  We have over 300 kids in the academy.  To think that out of a moving pool of 300 you might get one every now and again is not efficient.  I always felt that you should be looking to be developing five or six players that get through to your first team and we seem to have been quite successful at that and I think it’s because of the way we operate.

There is no secret, but what I would say is there is a philosophy which under pins the ability to develop young players in numbers. That philosophy is based on making sure that you absolutely optimize all of your resources.  I find it quite interesting when cubs struggle, clubs get relegated, can’t pay the wages of their first team, and they have no choice but to turn to the kids.  How many of those kids actually step up to the mark and come through?  A simple example of that would be Coventry.   When they lost its stadium; they were almost broke; they couldn’t buy players; they had an embargo; and they had no choice but to turn to the kids and had a fantastic season.  Would they have put those young players in had they had money to spend?  I don’t know the answer to that, but generally I would say, in my experience, when there is money to spend, you spend it and you ignore what is right in front of your nose.  So part of our philosophy is to make sure we never lose sight of the fact that we have very, very good players already in the building.  If we give the right pathway and develop them properly, they’ve got a chance to blossom and come through.

To create that pathway and to get them through you have to be very, very well structured, very well organized, and you have to make sure that your philosophy is adhered to and communicated so everybody knows what it’s about.  It’s not a surprise, it’s expected.  Then everybody works in the organization in whatever way they work, they work efficiently.  And again that comes down to an integrated structure and good communication.  There is not a secret, but there is a philosophy which underpins what we do.  What we then do is very simple.  This is just an example of one of our coaches who is now our under 18 coach.

VIDEO PLAYED BUT NOT TRANSCRIBED.

That’s just an example of a typical academy session.  Those boys at the time I think were under 15s.  One of the boys I’ve noticed there who sat on the floor scratching his neck with his bob cut will probably make his debut at some point during this season as a current under 18 player.

Thanks to Terry and Chris when we started the new academy—which I will come back to in a minute—five years ago, Chris and I met in a hotel in London with an idea of having a visual aid that was very simple easy to follow but was high quality and Chris and Terry developed the coaching manual which you would have heard of I hope.  What used to happen with us is I’d get 300 emails, letters, telephone calls from one source or another every month saying “can we come and watch the academy?  Can we see how the academy train?  Can we come to a training session?”  If we were to allow it, then all of our academy sessions would have 300 people stood around the outside.  To develop players is the big priority, not to demonstrate what we do.  The coaching manual fulfilled a need which was we take our academy out so people can see what we do.  Our sessions are simple—very, very high quality production.  That was what is called a “nugget” which just a quick look at a particular coaching session in the organization and a visual on it.

The byproduct of that is every player in our academy from 8 years of age to the first team is issued with an Ipad.  They have access to that resource all the time so they can prepare before they come to a training session.  They can revise what they have done by looking it up afterwards.  The parents can see what is going on, what they are doing, what the messages are, and they can help to reinforce that at home.  So it has given us a fantastic coaching resource as well as being able to demonstrate to the wider world we do what we do.  And that’s why there is no secret because if it was a secret we wouldn’t want to do it. We would want to keep that in house but its good quality basic coaching—well resourced and well planned and well organized with an integrated structured curriculum.

We feel that most of our kids the best learning they do is actually by doing it by training so long hours on the pitch. We organize our club in such a way that the boys get a lot of coaching hours.  But secondary to that is visual learning so it’s important that they have a chance not only to take part and do things but to see those things in action.  So apart from this as a coaching resource which shows the structure and organization of our sessions, gets the key points over that they can keep referring to, all of their sessions are filmed and they are filmed in such a way that they can then be fed back as feedback to the players so each of them can look at their own clips they can look at their own training clips and they can also look at their match performance clips any time they like via the coaching app which is on their iPad—the iPads that they are given and of course the coaches can sit with them in little groups and go through those things with them and support that feedback.  That’s been a fantastic tool for us the ability to see yourself and analyze yourself.  They have a period every week where they have to go through their clips and put into their own files their feedback, their own commentary, their own ideas about how they are preformed and so on.  Every game before the game they identify their own personal key targets for that game and the coach identifies team targets for that game and then they debrief them afterwards, but the debriefing is done visually through the resources that we’ve got and the technology we can use.

What it really boils down to at the end of the day is excellent players, excellent coaches, excellent facilities all brought together with an integrated curriculum that is based on a firm philosophy.

In terms of excellent players, that comes down to talent identification.  That’s one thing I think that really underpins everything we do is our talent ID program.  We have a big scouting department.  It’s structured in such a way that the scouts specialize in a particular type of scouting.  They are trained and developed in order to make sure that they are profiling the players they watch in a way that we believe they need to be profiled to come into the academy and move forward.  So there is a lot of hard work that goes on in that respect.

The scouting and recruitment department is also the analysis department.  Natasha [Patel?] who has been here this week works in the most fantastic facilities that you can imagine.  It’s like mission control in there.  Their place has been specifically designed for purpose but she deserves it because he has spent the last three years working in a Portakabin.  They did the job fantastically well before and now they can really get to grips with it.

But that was something we felt was worth the big investment.  The reason is that our scouting and talent ID is not simply the old fashion scout on the side of the pitch picking out the best or most effective player.  It’s the modern scouts that sit on the side of the pitch identifying potential and being able to almost fast forward to what he thinks a player will be with the coaching and development we put in in 3, 4, 5, 6 years of time.

Everyone can spot the 9, 10 year old who is bigger, stronger, and quicker  than everyone else and scores 25 goals in that age group who really should be playing higher up physically.  Everyone can spot that.  The parents on the line know who the most effective player is.  They watch them every week and know that he beats everybody and scores lots of goals.  What is very tricky is looking at the rest of the team and working out he’s very thin, he’s a bit skinny but he looks like he has a got the understanding and potential to go in years to come.  So that is the first point.

The second point is doing some due diligence on him.  Continually tracking players that are identified.  Continue monitoring them to a point where you want to now bring them in and see how they respond to the work of our coaching.

We have two academies.   We have one in Bath University which is part of the Bath University schools complex where we produce all our Commonwealth gold medalists and Olympic gold medalists and so on over the last few years in different sports.  So that cross fertilization of high level elite environment with everything it brings with it and the elite development of young players is a terrific tool for us to use.  All the resources that are at Bath are replicated at our main academy at Southampton and that enables us to get really into the bits and pieces of talent identification.  So when they’ve been spotted in their own environment, we’ve done the due diligence, we feel that they have got the potential to be a player, we bring them into our talent development centers and around Bath University we have 8 talent development centers and we have the same around the Southampton one.  We are just about to open a new one on the fringes of London.  We cover the whole of the south east.  It is very rare that we will go to the midlands or the north to scout and the reason for that is that we believe that our success is based on actually being the best in our own environment.  So south of London right the way down to Cornwall and across to the Kent coast is where we feel we specialize.  We dominate that area and we get the best players very young in that neck of the woods.  We feel that if we concentrate and focus on that rather than the method employed by some other clubs which is to spread their wings further and their tentacles further also to recruit players who are already in the system by paying compensation .  We do that very rarely.  What we try to do is make sure that there is no kid in our region that we haven’t seen.

Coming to the development centers, they spend six weeks working with the coaches and the sport scientists and they are then profiled.  They are—through that six week period—either identified as being ready to move into the academy or they will be invited back for further a period of time to maybe just reinforce or confirm things.  Once they go, they are never forgotten.  So they come through that and they don’t actually make it into the academy 8 or 9 or 10, they are consistently monitored because they may come in at 12 or 13 or later.  So they are never forgotten.  They are returned back to the environment they are in and no big promises made to them in the first place.  They understand. It’s well communicated that they’ve got an opportunity, but we are not promising anything, but we will always tabs on how you do in the future.  That goes all the way through to 16 where we have a second chance program.

We have another scholarship program down at Bath and another scholarship program at Southampton.  Not the academy scholarship program but the second chance scholarship program where there are 16 year olds who have either been released at other clubs or haven’t made it into our academy, but still show talent who are brought in on a full time basis.  They study the same course that our scholarship boys do in the academies and they have the same curriculum.

One example is a boy who came through that system; came into the academy; did very well in the academy; unfortunately, he was a left back and the same age as the left back we’ve got and we have another left back younger than him who also plays for England so there was no pathway.  And we have always had this philosophy that we create a pathway.  If we can’t create a pathway, we will help you move elsewhere.  He just signed a two year professional contract to Aston Villa.

So it shows that sort of parallel system working.  If they come through that system at 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 through the development centers and then are registered with the academy they then go on to the full time education program.  We have seven teachers in the club full time at our club.  The boys do all of their education and academic work with us which gives them more time on the training ground.  We don’t have a school.  They are still registered at their normal school and from 12 years of age or under 12 they come in once a week.  They stay with a host family which gives them two days training, one day of education with us and that increases 2, 3, or 4 days until they are 16 and are full time and move on to the sports deployment course.

We have 85 host families in and around the Southampton area.  We find that a better way of developing the kids than putting them into a hostel or boarding school environment.  They develop very strong relationships with the boy’s own family and some of those relationships like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain  still go on now.  The host family and his parents are good friends.  They go out to dinner.  They meet and Alex is always visiting them so we found that socially that works a lot better than putting them all in one residential block which we used to do.

The communication between parents, host family parents, the educating teachers, and the coaches is paramount.  You have to have a structure where all of those people are focused on developing the young player for professional football.  We are not embarrassed to say that.  Everything is geared to that.  However, we always have 100% pass rate on their B. Tech [?] courses to the level where if they don’t make it with us they have a university entrance qualification. We are quite proud of that, but it also accesses more money for us as well to develop the academy so that is useful as well.  However, we find that if you develop all those things together we think it makes for a better professional.

We have a brand now. Southampton academy is a brand.  Kids that don’t make it with us but have spent some time with us always seem to do very, very well when they move on.  Very rarely do we release scholars who do not get a professional contract somewhere else.  We put all our efforts into making sure that happens.

Great Moments in Recent Southampton History (Part 8)

Other than, perhaps, the Forren transfer saga, this is the stupidest moment I can remember since I started following Southampton.

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/10547085.VIDEO_EXCLUSIVE__Builders_hide_Pompey_shirt_at_Saints_training_ground/

Of course, there was an immediate follow up:

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/10551616.Builders_sacked_for_Pompey_shirt_prank_at_Saints__training_ground/

I found the comments below the second article interesting.  Many thought the builders got what they deserved while others thought that sacking them was a bit harsh.  I have no strong opinion.  Posting the stunt on Youtube was certainly stupid enough on its own to justify sacking.  If they had really been serious about cursing Southampton FC with the baleful influence of a Pompey shirt, they should have kept their mouths shut until construction was complete.  [Other nastier options deleted by exercising good judgment.]  Of course, if Pompey shirts do exude a baleful influence, possibly Portsmouth should change its colors—perhaps to red which I hear is quite popular in the far east.

Of course, Portsmouth fans are not the only ones who do stupid things.  http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/11500337.Anger_after_Pompey_war_memorial_defaced_with_Saints_graffiti/

This desecration was met with universal condemnation, but then it was more serious than a shirt prank.  In the words of Rodney King, “Can we all get along?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sONfxPCTU0

Probably not.

The Glass Ceiling (Part Four)

This is the long delayed fourth and final article in my discussion of whether Southampton is blocked by a glass ceiling from ever competing for a Champions League spot and, if so, whether there is a practical way to shatter that glass ceiling.  In my last article I said that I would discuss what Southampton could do to make more money available under the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules and the BPL’s salary cap. The earlier articles are found here, here, and here.

This article has been delayed, in part, because new information has come out which has required me to reconsider my analysis.  At least two well informed articles about Southampton FC were published by The Telegraph.  (Here and here.) A video of Les Reed’s speech to the 2014 Global Sportstec Innovation Conference was posted on Youtube.  Les Reed’s speech can be found here. 

While interesting in several ways, the articles’ primary relevance to this discussion is that they make it quite clear that Southampton intends to operate with, what I called in Part Two, sustainable money.  In other words, Katharina Liebherr wants to stop putting money into the team and have it start paying its own way.  This presents a significant barrier to our European ambitions.  If we are to get into the Champions League we must compete successfully with teams like Manchester City and Chelsea.  The owners of both teams still appear to be willing to put money into their teams, but are limited in how much they can put in by UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules.  Rounding off to the nearest million pounds and using recent Euro-Pound conversion rates, clubs are allowed to lose £24 million pounds every three years—which amounts to allowing owners to kick in £8 million pounds a year.  But this is not the end of the permissible contributions because UEFA FFP does not count all expenses as expenses.  Clubs do not have to count infrastructure development, youth development, and community development costs in calculating their losses.  Thus, Roman Abramovich can directly fund Chelsea’s youth program and any stadium expansion out of his own pocket without creating any FFP problems.  Our undoubtedly expensive academy could be paid for the same way, but, instead, will have to be paid for out of profits from the rest of the club.

On the other hand, a decision to operate on a sustainable basis, if executed, means that FFP is completely irrelevant to Southampton.  If the club breaks even every year we will never come close to exceeding the allowable FFP losses.  (In fact, our player trading profits for this year probably means that we will have no FFP problems for the next three years.)  This means that the only financial limitations on Southampton are the salary cap rules and the self-imposed need to break even.

As I have discussed before, the BPL salary cap is £56 million this year and £60 million next year but can be increased by the amount of the “Club’s Own Revenue Uplift” which is defined as

any increase in a Club’s revenue in a Contract Year when compared with its revenue in Contract Year 2012/13 (excluding Central Funds fee payments from its revenue in both the Contract Years).

(BPL Handbook 2014-2015 Rule A.1.35.)

In other words, all of the club’s revenue except the money it receives from the BPL directly—primarily TV money—can be used to increase the salary cap.  In the alternative, the salary cap can be increased by the profit from player trading, or the two combined.  Southampton starts out at a disadvantage relative to the bigger teams who are already receiving European TV money.  But there is nothing that can be done about this.  Instead, Southampton will have to compete by increasing its other revenue.    

In order to figure out where Southampton stands—relative to other BPL teams—I looked at the financial summary of BPL teams published by The Guardian.  The 2012-2013 results are here.

I have taken the liberty of creating this chart.  Amounts are in millions of pounds.

Club                       Match Day          Commercial        Total Non-TV Revenue

Arsenal                 93                           44                           190

Aston Villa           13                           16                           36

Chelsea                 71                           84                           155

Everton                 17                           14                           31

Fulham                 12                           11                           24

Liverpool             45                           98                           143

Man City              40                           143                         183

Man U                  109                         153                         262

Newcastle           28                           17                           45

Norwich               17                           8                              25

QPR                       8                              9                              18

Reading                 9                              5                              15

Southampton    17                           7                              25

Stoke                    10                           8                              23

Sunderland         19                           13                           32

Swansea              10                           6                              16

Tottenham         33                           57                           90

West Brom         7                              10                           17

West Ham           18                           20                           29

Wigan                   5                              2                              12

As I discussed in earlier posts, if Southampton is to compete for Europe, we need to both punch above our salary weight and increase that weight.  Surprisingly, we are not as far from that target as it might appear—Everton is only £6 million ahead of us.  On the other hand, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester City are probably beyond our reach.  For that reason, Tottenham should be our target.  Tottenham has finished fourth twice in recent years.  If Southampton can increase its revenue to the Tottenham level, and continue to do an outstanding job with its academy and transfer business, the club would have a shot at getting into the Champions League some years and would be competitive for Europe in most years.  We would also avoid the annual relegation battle.

One problem with this goal is that it is a moving target.  As my recent post about stadium expansion discussed, Tottenham is planning to build a new stadium which will bring in at least £15.3 million a year in increased match day income and probably a lot more.  Tottenham has also increased its commercial income since 2013, but figuring out by exactly how much is not easy.  I am guessing they have increased it by £10 million, but who knows.  You can check some of the articles here, here, and here. Combining the numbers, Tottenham’s non-TV revenue will hit at least £115 million.  Is there any way for Southampton to grow its non-TV revenue by £90 million?  (Keep in mind that Tottenham will continue to grow their income while we try to do the same.)

I think the answer is clearly no.  Our ability to increase match day income is minimal, if we do not expand St. Mary’s, and I do not believe such an expansion is financially viable at this time.  (See my stadium capacity blog post here.)  Because Tottenham is a London team it has clear advantages in increasing attendance and charging higher ticket prices.  We will never be able to match that.  Plus, they are more famous than us so they are more desirable to commercial sponsors.  We can certainly increase our commercial income significantly, but probably not by £90 million—at least not unless we are appearing in Europe regularly.

This is not to say that significant increases in income are not available.  Southampton can play a more profitable set of preseason friendlies by going to the United States.  If we maintain our league position from last season and our reputation for an attractive style of play we ought to be able to draw crowds in the United States next summer.   While we are unlikely to fill The Big House with nearly 110,000 people like Manchester United and Real Madrid did on August 2, 2014, we can certainly make more money than we did by visiting Brighton, Bournemouth, and Swindon. (Although our preseason schedule certainly prepared us well for the new season and that must be the priority.)

Southampton could try to set up some kind of profitable relationship with a club in the United States.  I would suggest Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, or San Jose. Last year Seattle averaged 38,500 fans per game and their stadium can hold 67,000. A west coast tour could be profitable and create more Southampton fans in the United States.  (Plus, a visit to San Jose or Los Angeles would let me see the team play in person—the highest of priorities.)

More and more people are watching the BPL in the United States.  There might be American sponsors who cannot afford Manchester United, who would like a BPL link.  I am relatively confident the club is already working on this, but that should be a high priority.

It would also help if we had someone paying us to make our kits—although I assume that is the plan and this year was an aberration.

Southampton can increase its income to be more competitive with other established BPL teams like Aston Villa, Newcastle, and Everton.  However, we are unlikely to be able to compete with the biggest teams.  In fact, the only way we can hope to compete with them, at least in the foreseeable future, is by doing what we did this year—selling players at a profit, buying new, good players cheaply, and using the proceeds to fund our academy, our scouting system, and increased salaries for the players we keep. 

However, this limitation is not the result of a glass ceiling created by FFP and the salary cap.  It is a limitation that is imposed by not having a very rich owner who is willing to spend insane amounts of her own money on the team.  If our owner were willing to spend money like Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, FFP and the salary cap would limit her ability to do so, but there is no reason we should expect her to spend that kind of money.  (Assuming I have read the official club accounts properly, in the fiscal year ending on June 2013, she made a capital contribution of £25,988,244 and bought one share of stock for £11,999,999.  That is a pretty generous contribution to the club although I would avoid characterizing it as insane.  There is no reason to expect that to reoccur every year.)

Going back to the original question which triggered this series of posts, Martin Samuel is right that there is a glass ceiling that blocks our progress, but wrong about it being imposed on Southampton by FFP.  He is right that it is risky to sell good players every year, but wrong when he says we should not do it because it is the only way we can grow the club.